Orchard: Field Notes for a Public Sculpture, Permanently in Progress

1. Once I asked my studio art students at the campus arboretum to each find a boring tree, and present it to the class. We stood around each tree as if to give it a critique and, together, made observations. Inevitably, no tree was ever convincingly boring. The longer you paid it attention, noticed its odd shape, curled leaves, or moth casings camouflaged in the bark, the more interesting it became. That one? There’s a bird’s nest in it! Over there? We get maple syrup from those! That one? It’s entwined with its neighbour, and parasitic vines! This one? It smells like soap! How about this one, so symmetrical and ordinary? The closer we looked, the more surprise or nostalgia or tenderness pulled itself right up through our veins. This one? Oxygen. And it takes sunshine and water, and turns them into wood. We put our arms around the trees—all of us artists, preoccupied with the tricky work of creating new objects of interest, and here all around us were these completely amazing things. I showed them a simple work by Lenka Clayton. It consists of a piece of paper, with a tiny, shiny pointed seed sitting in the middle of it. The description typed at the bottom of the page reads: Future Apple Tree – 08/11/2015. It took everybody’s breath away.

2. Thoreau, an apple aficionado, described a redfleshed variety as “perfused with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat.” Apples are some of the most ordinary magic, and the diversity of varietals is dazzling. There is the pear-flavoured White Winter Pearmain, and the Black Gilliflower—an ancestor of the Red Delicious shaped like a sheep’s nose. There are star-shaped apples and egg-shaped apples. There are white apples and black apples, those with translucent skin, apples that are big as a bowling ball, or have a bluish cast or melting buttery flesh. There are apples that are weirdly elongated and smell like roses. There is a variety where each fruit has a large welt, called Patte de Loup, because the apple looks mauled by a wolf. Some precarious apple varietals last only a few days before they turn to rot. While some of today’s popular commercial ones, the limegreen Granny Smith for example, were found on the desks of people who fled their offices back in March of 2020, still edible and solid, more than a year later when they came back to work in 2021. There are apples that still exist, on trees that have been propagated, by passing a scion from hand to hand of orchardists across generations, since the Roman empire.

3. Helen Humphreys, in her book The Ghost Orchard, describes the history and development of distinct apple varietals— of which there are thousands—and how the movement of this fruit around the world tells a story of human migration, colonization, survival, and violence. Even the apples that are lost, or extinct—like those propagated by Indigenous people in orchards that were destroyed or stolen by settlers—tell us a story about our fraught relationships with each other, with food, and with land. While they are ubiquitous and cheap, an apple in your hand is a wonder—packed with aesthetic, gastronomic, and historical information. It is a designed thing, a cultural object, an incidental artwork that speaks to our tastes and values and desires. Each apple is a story about ourselves.

4. It seemed logical to me, particularly in this historical moment, to use a site and all the institutional resources reserved to support public art, to plant trees. I would make a composition of trees. They would be impractical trees, rare, that represent the most unusual, eccentric, historic, or beautiful of their kind. Red ones, green ones, yellow ones, a giant one, tiny ones, and a russet. The City would keep them safe (care for, and if necessary, re-plant them) in perpetuity, as is stipulated in the standard commission agreements. The trees could be made available to the people in the neighbourhood, for food and shade, and learning, and beauty. They will even contribute to remediating the soil in the contaminated landscape. Is there any other kind of sculpture that could perform even a small measure of service to the public like that?

5. Practically, this project has been an odyssey. I set out to learn more about apples, grafting, urban orchards, orchard stewardship, and more—a process that I learned was as slow as growing trees. I took certification classes online, joined a community organization dedicated to the task, made friends with orchardists and arborists and practiced fruit-tree grafting—and all its faint hopes—with an old tree in my backyard. I ate apples: any uncommon varietals I could get my hands on from across the world and time and season. I waited—to see what might grow, or take, or wither—for years. The work developed, and the practical research is ongoing. I pitched ORCHARD, something I described as “an unusual and ongoing work of living, growing public art—one that combines ecological, aesthetic, and gastronomical interests—while challenging traditions of public sculpture and contributing to urban life” to several organizations. I suggested a commitment to care for the trees for the next 100 years. Curators, directors, and cultural programmers were mostly bewildered by it. They struggled to see past the institutional calendars, the short exhibition seasons, the building construction schedule, the impermanence of staff, or the landscaping that needed to be transformed into parking. As contemporary art, an orchard was too slow a spectacle and vastly too long a game.

6. Despite all the cost, controversy, and the ambitious scope of the project, Joseph Beuys directed the installation of 7000 young oak trees in Kassel, Germany, beginning in 1982, which was then completed after his death by his son in 1987. Informed by ideas of public service and environmental stewardship, and democratizing the meaningful work of artmaking, Beuys described the ongoing project as a way to extend the art gallery out into the city. While the roots of the mighty trees hold the city of Kassel together, and the canopy defines its streetscape, 7000 Oaks has since been extended in new forms around the world, with trees planted, sometimes by school children, in New York and Baltimore and beyond.

7. Noa Bronstein and Chloe Catan, then working with the City of Mississauga, said yes to the ORCHARD project as a work of public art. They said yes to taking on the cost and long-term care required for the success of the project, with tremendous foresight and enthusiasm. While the modern city of Mississauga, located in the Territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the territory of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Wyandot, and Huron people, was the site of many fruit tree orchards in Ontario, few remain today. Their history is only faintly alluded to in the names of the streets and other places all around the city—from Golden Orchard Drive to Applewood Hills and Orchard Road and others. The specific site intended for hosting the project was exceptionally storied, most recently, as an artillery factory where women worked and lived in residence during WWII to build small weapons. The Small Arms Inspection Building, as it is known, and the contaminated land around it have been part of an ongoing restoration project. The building itself is the subject of warring visions, for its future as a military museum or a contemporary art gallery, a community food and gardening hub, a wedding venue, or something else yet to be imagined, contested, and re-imagined again. ORCHARD, however, is under the exclusive care of the city’s Public Art division and about the only thing on the site that can’t be moved or destroyed. The city committed to caring for it, even replanting trees after they die, in perpetuity.

8. I got the trees for twelve unusual apple varietals—a few historic Ontario apples, pretty golden orbs that taste like pineapple, the famous White Winter Pearmain, a few weirdly shaped apples, some excessively beautiful ones, and two that are very rare. The young rootstock trees were grafted for the project by Bill O’Keefe, a veritable curator of apples, a librarian of their histories, with more than 400 historic varietals in his expansive, extraordinary orchard, O’Keefe Grange, near Owen Sound. Urban orchardist and educator Susan Poizner dug the first hole in the ground with me to examine the soil, and gave me courage and her blessings. Ray Martinez, an experienced arborist and orchardist agreed to direct its care, and local community gardeners and volunteers, especially Daniel Reyes, water the trees regularly through every terrible heat wave, wrap them and document their growth, and meticulously pick caterpillars and beetles one by one from their emerging leaves. The deer, uninvited, help with pruning, but Bill O’Keefe reassures me that a little stress—as is the course of things in nature—might help strengthen the trees.

9. Every seed in an apple will grow a unique tree, different from its mother tree and the tree that pollinated it. To get the same apple over and over again—a Hornburger Pancake or a Cox’s Orange Pippin, for example—you must cut a pencil-thin branch, called a scion, and with clean instruments and wax, graft it onto the root stock of some other hardy apple tree trunk. The success rate of this process is very low, but if the new graft is accepted, you will have a genetic clone of your original tree with the same kind of apples on it. Among my collaborators in ORCHARD are the orchardists from the near and distant past who grafted a scion for each of the varietals onto new rootstocks and passed new scions on to other orchardists, on and on and so forth, in an act of hope, generosity, and patience for the benefit of others around them, and for future generations. From across time, they have put these apples into our hands.

10. I made a poster to accompany the project, since two-foot-tall spindly things in small holes in a neglected field might not generate much aesthetic interest for a while. My vision for this composition of trees, of almost-impossible fruit, was illustrated and designed by educator and interdisciplinary artist JP King. With my untested skills at orchard stewardship in mind, I included a disclaimer right on the document: “In light of inevitable scabs and rusts, blights and mildews, flies and maggots: and the vagaries of winter, vandals, rabbits and mice—there will be changes and new varietals tried and tried again in ORCHARD.” The Orchard imagined here is where we began, when the trees were planted in 2019. Since then there have been surprises I hadn’t even thought of under the leaves. During the first pandemic summer, when the grass grew taller than the young saplings, I nearly stepped on a fawn hiding among the trees. As of 2022, the twelve original trees are alive and thriving. And when I visit the young trees now, during this ongoing period of uncertainty and grief, they bring consolation I never expected. They remind me of the future, one with flowers, fruit, and other surprises—possibly good ones—that I haven’t yet imagined.

11. Under Rachel Pennington’s supervision from the City of Mississauga’s Public Art division, and everyone’s dedicated care, they are all still alive and healthy, and at least twice as tall as when they were planted. The first few apples are expected next summer, in 2023. But more and more each year, I document the growth of the trees beside my growing son. I am hopeful this work will outlive me, and him too. It is considered “permanent” public art, despite how much it will change, and the world will change around it. Even if a work is made of steel or concrete, this is always the case. And I can only hope that as we all grow, and war and water and wonder, we might at least have fairy food to eat, in the shade, together.

Diane Borsato (BFA York University, MFA Concordia University, MA Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) is an Associate Professor at the University in Guelph where she teaches advanced courses in Experimental Studio that explore the relationships between art and everyday life, including Food and Art, Special Topics on Walking, Live Art, and OUTDOOR SCHOOL.

Borsato was awarded the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award from the Canada Council for the Arts, and was twice nominated for the Sobey Art Award. She has exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, the AGYU, the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Owens Museum, the National Art Centre, the Toronto Biennial of Art and in galleries and museums internationally.

This article is published in issue 39.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue